BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  MAY 5, 2025 

When I was a young journalist, I wrote newspaper columns. In one I lamented the fact that through most of my life the US had been involved in one military action after another, from Asia to the Caribbean. I wrote it during those days and weeks we were ingloriously taking our leave from South Vietnam, 50 years ago this month.

It was an era when many Americans, especially the younger generations, were tired of war and longed for lasting peace. Music of the time reflected that, especially the reincarnation of an ageless Civil War era African-American spiritual, Down by the Riverside. Among the lyrics: “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside. I ain’t gonna study war no more.” Pete Seger recorded a new version in 1963 and it became a Vietnam protest ballad.

So here we are again. More than a half-century later, while global war has been averted, military conflicts are widespread, from the South Pacific to the Persian Gulf, the Indian subcontinent, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

You would think that the young journalist today would side with President Trump’s car-lot dealmaking style to end the war in Ukraine at any cost as long as it benefited the dealership. No thanks.

The United States must stand behind Ukraine, aggressively.

The US should repair the damage done to our European alliances and those of other democracies that believe Putin’s Russia is in Reagan’s words, an Evil Empire.

Americans, according to survey research, remain fairly-evenly divided on our involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war. Fair enough. Ukraine must have the armaments and military intelligence to defend itself and repel Russian occupation of 20 percent of the country.

President Trump made a campaign promise in 2024 that he would bring a quick end to the war through negotiation (he made the same promise about the war in Gaza). If that were realistic, he would be entitled to that opportunity, albeit on a short leash.

The problem is campaign promises are the art of persuasion and illusion. Electing someone on the basis of a promise holds no promise that it will happen. It appeals to those who desperately want it to happen and are willing to suspend disbelief to believe. In this case that campaign promise conveniently cloaked the very hard, harsh, and immensely complex realities of international relations and protecting democratic rule.

The harshest reality was then, and is now, that Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia with an iron first for 25 years, wants war and is very righteous in his zeal.

“The ugly truth is at last dawning on the White House—or let’s hope it is—that Vladimir Putin has no interest in settling for a tie in Ukraine…”, wrote Barton Swaim in the Wall Street Journal this week.

“Mr. Putin fully embraces the centuries-old myth of Russia as the victim of betrayal and exploitation…” so “Russia must fight foes bent on stealing its wealth and destroying its people.”

Putin has vowed to restore the old Russian empire, which has included Ukraine intermittently dating back to the Bolshevik Revolution and most recently in the aftermath of World War II. Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, just eight years before Putin became Russian Prime Minister.

The current history of Ukraine has been one of turmoil in the tug-of-war between East and West. It has suffered from corrupt leadership, violence, economic downturns, and divided loyalties, politically, ethnically, and regionally.

Those conditions may have invited foreign exploitation. Putin established a Russian separatist movement in the Donbas region and annexed Crimea in 2014.

Two years after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected Ukraine’s President, Putin amassed troops along the Ukrainian border and launched his invasion the next year. Ukrainians have felt the ruthless rath of Putin ever since.

After President Trump alleged that Zelensky had started the war, told him that if he didn’t capitulate he wouldn’t have a country to govern, and blocked Zelensky from “peace” negotiations, there didn’t seem to be much doubt as to Trump’s motives.

The respected Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called it “Trump’s sledgehammer approach to diplomacy. Now it’s time to begin taking some swings at Russia…”, he wrote.

But Trump never did. A few weeks later, columnist Max Boot observed that “the Russian President is playing the Americans like a Stradivarius.” The inexperienced special envoy to Russia, Steven Witkoff seems to get the most play in Putin’s puppetry.

Putin has not only defied and violated ceasefire agreements, he has made nonnegotiable demands but no concessions and continued the indiscriminate bombardment of Ukraine, among the latest an attack on the city of Sumy on Palm Sunday that killed 34 civilians.

French President Emmanuel Macron, a Ukraine ally, said after the attack “Everyone knows that Russia alone wanted this war. Today, it is clear that Russia alone is choosing to continue it….”

The one positive step in the stalemate has come with the signing of a US/Ukraine agreement on US access to the country’s mineral resources in exchange for US aid. But even that agreement ignores President Trump’s history of not keeping his word, most notably his oath of office to uphold our Constitution. The agreement creates a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.

The pact provides for “a long-term strategic alignment” between the two countries and US “support for Ukraine’s security, prosperity, reconstruction, and integration into global economic frameworks,” according to the Post.

I’m no expert in international negotiation but there seems to be an awful lot of interpretive wiggle-room in those carefully chosen words and, as we know, Trump has a way with interpreting everything from the Constitution to election results conveniently different than many of us.

The fate of Ukraine may delineate the future fate of Europe, the NATO alliance, and the United States. After all, Putin’s quest to restore the empire would then make targets of other former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, several of which are already back under the Russian spell. We know how well the domino theory worked out in Southeast Asia. It didn’t. But this is another time, in another place, under different circumstances, with two ambitious, transactional, and unscrupulous world leaders who share a dangerous imperialistic world view.

“It’s useful exercise to ask how government’s behavior will be perceived by readers of history a century later,” Swaim wrote. “If in the end Mr. Trump listens to Mr. Vance and Donald Trump Jr. and cuts off aid to Ukraine, the outcome will invite comparisons to the allies in 1939. I’m not referring to the Munich Agreement, which happened the previous year, but to the failure of Britain and France to support Poland as both had pledged to do, in its courageous but doomed stand against the German Wehrmacht.”

The allies had many excuses, some legitimate, most of them timid, yet the disgrace is real. Their echo today can be heard in the words and seen in the actions of Zelensky’s detractors, Swaim opined.

“America need only send weapons, not men, to Ukraine. If we can’t manage that, we will deserve the scorn of our grandchildren,” he concluded.

I agree. I still lament war, but failure to protect our democratic allies and our future is, indeed, disgraceful.